Do not knock.

Sophomore year of college I discovered a book called Diet for a New America, by John Robbins. Robbins was heir to the Baskin-Robbins chain, but before he took the reigns, he wanted to see where BR's dairy came from first hand. He discovered the grim realities of factory farming and decided to forsake the family business. His stories immediately inspired me to change my dietary leanings and delve into the world of animal rights literature, philosophy, and activism. I wrote several papers on animal rights for classes, printed up essays I'd found and shared them with others, left pamphlets at cafes around town, even protested (gently and respectfully) a fur shop and rodeo. The strangest part of this expedition was the opposition I found in the Christian community I was a part of. I was on a campus that declared Jesus the Prince of Peace, but any time I even mentioned I had recently gone vegetarian/vegan I was hit with waves of confrontation. I had found a new way of living that meshed perfectly with the ideas of the figure-head of my faith, but those around me just wouldn't have the same epiphany I had.

When we had the sweet-baby-cake-O'-wheat a few years ago, we had issues with solicitors knocking on our door and throwing wrenches in our newly-found routines. After visiting a friend down the street, we stole her idea and put a colorful sign on the door that said:

 Please, no soliciting. Sleeping baby inside. If we do not already know you, DO NOT KNOCK.

Last summer that sign wore thin and fell off. Luckily, our picture window lends me a heads-up so I can see them coming. Though I feel like a jerk about it because our baby is older now, I've taken to just not answering the door. They usually leave a pamphlet rubber-banded to our door explaining how I need their cable services, lawn-care services, meat-delivery services, or church services, etc. More often than not, it's a local church trying to gather a constituency. This struck a conversation with a neighbor, she said, and I'm paraphrasing: If they truly believe we'll be condemned to eternal torment in Hell if we don't embrace their belief, I guess I respect that they're reaching out and trying to save our souls. I just don't want to be interrupted by strangers, no matter their agenda.

As I found all this AR literature I was also making a case to present to other believers that the animal-concern was also a faith-concern. Aside from what I deemed ethical responsibilities to "do justice and love mercy," I remember talking to my dad on the phone about the story in Genesis where god gives man the freedom to eat animals after the fall, the story every voice of opposition would site. The point I argued was this:

After the fall, Eden's paradise was no longer an option, so god allowed humanity to kill after they'd turned their backs on innocence, it was a concession, not god's ideal. And if we're to be praying for life here to be "on earth as it is in Heaven," surely Heaven is god's ideal and free from concessions. Thus, if "the lion will lay with the lamb," how can we willingly take up the knife here, but pray for the opposite? Isn't that prayer hoping to re-establish Eden?

It's a solid argument, and one that opened him up to vegetarianism as a faith-based way of life. Two points for the boy! But even though I felt completely comfortable arguing this to other believers, even my father, the Minister, arguing my faith itself to non-believers always left me feeling inadequate.

My Genesis argument (stolen from greater thinkers) exists in the theoretical realm. I would never have tried to convince someone who didn't believe in the Genesis story in the first place that any of this was a legitimate reason to consider vegetarianism. Believers have already accepted the Eden story, whether as allegory or literal, and the fall of man is ever-present at the pulpit. But for me the very reason to find this argument and transmit it was inspired by tangible and unequivocal evidence about animal practices. However, the need to save souls from eternal condemnation draws inspiration from a few passages, and one very colorful (and terrifying) final chapter, in one very disputed book. What allows people, with only their faith in the stories of an ancient book, to feel comfortable claiming they know what happens to everyone's souls after death? The other extraneous reasons aside (the way, the truth, the life, etc.), this is the brass-tacks reason why people are knocking on my door and leaving flyers inviting me to their church barbecue next Sunday. It's in the book.

Last week, a few days before Easter, an elderly customer approached me at work, this was our exchange:

Lady: Oh there's Aaron!

Me: (thinking: do I know you?) Hi there!

Lady: That's such a good biblical name! 

Me: (thinking: oh noooo...) It is? 

Lady: You didn't know that? 

Me: No, I did. 

Lady: I belong to a nice church, would you like to come with me Sunday for Easter?

Me: No thanks.

Lady: Well, that's disappointing....

After a final greeting, smiling through my teeth, I professionally turned my cheek. No matter how condescending I perceive her to be, she's simply trying to reach out, the only way she knows how. Several deep breaths later, I let it go, because it doesn't matter. She has her views, I have mine.

No matter how clear the evidence is, people want to accept information on their own terms. Whether it's the effects of our cultural-dietary-habits, or the knockers' offer of eternal paradise, no one wants to be interrupted by someone else's agenda. I toned down my rhetoric years ago, partly from dissolution, but mostly because I see the grey areas in life a little more every day, allowing the Golden Rule to be my rule of thumb.

Change and inspiration must come naturally through relationships that are unfettered by agendas. Though I think my motives from once-upon-a-time were righteous, my methods were innately wall-building. It seems clear that no one wants to be cajoled, argued, persuaded, pushed, reasoned, or guilted into a different point of view, even if it's smothered in bbq-sauce. 

By the power of Greyskull...

A few nights ago I watched an episode of TED Talks: Life Hack, hosted by Amy Cuddy, entitled "Your body language shapes who you are." The gist of it, warning: spoiler alert, Cuddy says her research shows that not only can your mindset affect your body language, but you can trick your mindset by changing your body language. They found positive and negative changes in brain-controlled-body-chemistry based on "powerful" and "powerless" body language. She argued that as little as 2 minutes of "power-posing" can trick your mind into being more confident in stressful situations. Fascinating stuff right? At a friend's house for dinner last night I joked with Candy asking her if I looked powerful as I sat sprawled in a chair, legs slung open, and hands cradled behind my head? She responded with: "uh, you look kinda yucky." Had I sat that way for 2 minutes though, I may have convinced myself to be more powerful in the conversation that followed. In conclusion, Cuddy put a twist on "Fake it til' you make it" changing it to "Fake it til' you become it!" She scientifically proved that simple changes in how we hold ourselves can make big differences in how we see ourselves AND how others see us.

I've never been much of a powerful-sort of person. I like to joke that my sister is the Alpha-Male of our family. Perhaps it's simply my chemical make-up. Amy Cuddy explained that higher Testosterone levels tend to create the need-to-succeed, while low Cortisol levels allow for easy stress management.  If high testosterone levels and low cortisol levels are found in powerful-leader-sorts, maybe I'm somewhere in the middle on both. Or perhaps it's the examples before me: my father tending towards diplomacy and compromise, my mother assertive, or even aggressive at times, and I just lean towards the former. Or maybe it's passages like "the meek shall inherit the earth" that resonated with me early on. Probably a combination of these, and then some, as it usually is.

I can count on one hand the amount of times I've felt powerful.

I hate that word: powerful. It has so many negative connotations in my mind, as I'd imagine it does to most left-leaning thinkers. It's been ruined by those who abuse it. Power-hungry, Power-tripping, Power-mongering...okay the last one I haven't actually heard, but it's a feasible extension of the others. They all make me think of Skeletor. But if I subtract those feelings I have around the abuse of power I can see it more clearly as the feeling that comes with standing firm in what you believe is right. What is right is subjective of course, but the feeling that comes with boldly representing it can still exist even if you're in the wrong.

Maybe a week after it opened, my dad and I went to see The Dark Knight Rises. I was hesitant about seeing it as a new release because I generally hate crowds at theaters and was worried a crowd would ruin my final experience of the final installment of Chris Nolan's grande Bat-dream. Low and behold, the previews run and 4 aisles ahead and 10 chairs to my right, a woman sits with her cellphone outstretched, with maximum screen brightness, like she's far-sighted and the miniscule words on her device are only readable at arm's length...my eyes can't not see it. But it's only the previews. My heart has faith that surely, surely, this woman will put her phone away and partake with us in the most important movie of 2012. She doesn't. We're on an airplane meeting Bane for the first time and I'm rage-sweating over this illumination in my periphery. (Why I care so much is something I'm working on, but I'm sure you can relate.) I lean over and tell Dad: "I'll be right back." In my calmest tone, I say to the woman: "Your phone is making it hard to watch this movie. I'd really appreciate it if you put it away." Trembling, I walked back to my seat. After a moment, she put it away! I suddenly felt the air conditioning applying itself to my skin, and, with the exception of the way Bane's voice was mixed, enjoyed the rest of the movie! When that phone was out of sight, I wanted to raise my magical sword and yell:

"I HAVE THE POWER!!!"

It's a rare moment when a confrontation allows me to speak my mind clearly. Granted, I had practiced what I was going to say probably ten times before approaching that woman, but still. Usually I intend to speak my truth, but the stress of the situation makes me bobble words and stumble making my case. And then I daydream about how sweet it would've been if I had just said this-or-that. I've spoken before of the need to be or feel right. I wonder if this feeling of power comes to most of us only when we believe our stance is righteous? Do those who seem power-hungry believe their attempts are righteous? Could this be the difference between making some of us lions and some lambs? At what point does one choose to become Skeletor over He-Man? This is delving near the topic of good and evil, which is way bigger than I could ever handle. 

My old MySpace account used to have the quote, self-written, (yes, I quote myself sometimes): "live and let live while keeping your spine in tact." All power-poses aside, I am hungry for those moments when my spine feels forged of steel. 

The Reformer.

My Uncle works at a community center that serves the homeless. He's a retired minister (as was his father and my father) and is given the opportunity to teach classes on various interests. The past few times I've seen him he's talked most about his class on The Enneagram. The what? The Enneagram. (www.enneagraminstitute.com, check it.) It's a personality test that assesses a dominant personality-type that describes how we see the world, or really, react to the world. The test is accompanied by a logo that resembles a sweet-super-hero-emblem-looking-pentagram with 9 points on its star; The 9 points represent these dominant personality types: The Helper, The Achiever, The Individualist, The Investigator, The Loyalist, The Enthusiast, The Peacemaker, The Reformer, and The Challenger.

The Enneagram system believes that we are born with a dominant personality type which is determined by "inborn temperament" and "pre-natal factors." As the system explains, we all have various pieces of each of the 9 types, but one is always dominant, and this dominant type does not change. If it's determined I'm a Helper I cannot suddenly be a Challenger, even though I may start feeling more like the description of The Challenger.

As my Aunt and Uncle were discussing their types my Uncle said: "I generally feel like I'm doing things the best way and want everyone else to do them my way too." I can't remember positively, but based on the description below, I think he's The Reformer.

The Reformer: Reformers are conscientious and ethical, with a strong sense of right and wrong. They are teachers, crusaders, and advocates for change: always striving to improve things, but afraid of making a mistake. Well-organized, orderly, and fastidious, they try to maintain high standards, but can slip into being critical and perfectionistic. They typically have problems with resentment and impatience. At their Best: wise, discerning, realistic, and noble. Can be morally heroic.

Something clicked: This is exactly the way I think!

Fatherhood has been a strange journey toward finding methods that work for me when Candice is not around. Our household is Mommy-centric by design. Candy bravely accepted the havoc that pregnancy wreaked upon her body and spent 30 hours in the labyrinth of labor as Franny begrudgingly required us to surgically-extract her. She's willingly given her time and body, since day one, so Franny can eat, sleep, and cuddle as she needs to. I do my best to hold her hand and support her so she can do these things and still keep her sanity. I take an immense amount of pride in the times when I'm able to keep Franny engaged enough that she forgets Candy is gone. But when Mommy returns and does something differently than I have, or think I would-have, that pride turns me into a scum-bag who creates the air of "I told you so." Really supportive Aaron, really supportive. And how easily I forget the incalculable amounts of times when my wonderful wife saves the day by doing exactly what our baby needs at the exact time she needs it, evading all complications.

A question weaseling its way into my mind: What are the potential reasons that influence why people make the decisions they make?

If there is one thing that my folks are good at complaining about, it's other drivers. Without her being in the car I still hear my mom's classic "Get it rollin' Duuuude!" every time someone is unaware that the light turned green. It's become a household favorite for us as I imitate it with a vibrato-warble in the "Duuuude!" Makes me laugh every time! A buddy of mine once told me he read a study where a survey concluded that something like 93% of drivers think they're better at driving than everyone else. Nowadays, I think righteous-road-rage is a little more understandable as the youngsters text and Facebook their ways to-and-fro while their knees hold the wheel. But I'm guessing, for as mad as we get at those obvious hazards, most of the time people are probably just distracted for the moment: lost in thought, or conversation, or a story on NPR. Innocent reasons.

A few months ago I had a run-in with a coworker, whom I actually love dearly, about something that was left in his way. He had a decently narrow path to traverse and someone placed something in the way, preventing him to get by. Rather than move it to wherever he'd deem a better spot and carry on, he proceeded to berate the theoretical "moron" who made the decision to leave the obstacle where they did. I was having a short-on-patience kind of day, and this was the straw that broke me. I tore into him for what I saw as his sheer arrogance at thinking someone intentionally tried to screw him over. With vitriol, I sarcastically spewed forth: "Yeah, of course, if everyone did everything the way you do it everything would run perfectly!" There's no way anyone could have had any other reason to put that there than to fuck-you-up right?!?" After I was done raging, I explained why I got so riled up, and asked his forgiveness. He obliged.

Really, the source of this explosion was the mirror my buddy was pointing at me. He was saying things that I hate, but I used to be right there, damning "culprits" for being "morons who are doing everything wrong." In the past couple years I've worked hard to embrace what should be obvious: people think and do things differently than I do. This inclination towards judgement is a demon I wrestle with regularly.

The grace within the Enneagram system is that it explains no personality type is inherently positive or negative, and none of them are better than others, they just are. They have strengths and weaknesses, room for growth, and each hopes to present opportunities for introspection about how we think and react. I've not taken the test, who knows, maybe The Reformer wouldn't encapsulate me after all. But the mere title of it, The Reformer, struck a cord, for good and for bad.

If I am to be a reformer, let it be me who is the subject of the reformation.

Red is red.

In college I learned about Jurgen Habermas' concept of the lifeworld. As I remember it, the lifeworld is the sum of everything we've learned in life, from birth to the present, about how the world works. It is a universe which encompasses what can be deemed objective-truth, mostly things we understand but do not have to think about, because they are just given. It is the overarching context that all of us draw from as conscious human beings. While it's acknowledged there are universal aspects of the lifeworld, Habermas was interested in how personal lifeworlds could be infiltrated by information which would set them apart from other cultures. The more I read the more complicated the concept seems to get, and Wikipedia is weaving a web that is trying to entangle me beyond my scope. So we have this knowledge-universe, which, upon preliminary examination, may seem obvious; things like red is red, or food is necessary to live, or everyone eventually dies. Children tend to ask about these in the 'Why?' stage and we do our best to explain, realizing that until that moment, we hadn't really thought about it for a while either...they're just truths that we've come to accept.

I've opened a larger box than I intended to, but what I'm trying to wrap my mind around is that, for as much effort as I put into trying to understand why I am who I am, and what my lifeworld has determined as given, I'm baffled by the possibility that I also have an unconscious existence that could be influencing me in ways I'm unaware of, or at least locking away some of the answers I seek. The aspects of our shared lifeworld can be analyzed and theorized up and down by those who find that to be their passion, but my unconscious mind is a mystery even to me.

Though it didn't originate with him, Freud popularized the idea of the the unconscious mind. By his estimation it is a repository of collected experiences and memories, specific to individuals, that manifest themselves in dreams, thoughts which seem to have no origin, and skills that take no thought to perform, i.e. riding a bike (once learned that is.) He might assert that Jason Bourne was able to kick-so-much-ass-without-knowing-why because of his unconscious retention. His ability to act, after the name of my old Karate Dojo, was "Mushin," Japanese for "no mind." But, obvious, super-hero-like abilities (and analogies) aside, what in the heck role does my unconscious mind play in my daily life?

From the browsing I've done re-familiarizing myself with it, researchers widely agree that we cannot access unconsciousness through introspection. And because of this, I find the possibility that memories and experiences could be locked away, without an obvious key, disconcerting. In my darkest days, when I'm feeling the most doubtful that I'm doing things right in life, it'd be nice to take a stroll through fields of forgotten memories that might impart new opportunities for insight. But for now, as I've been, I will keep trying to see things as clearly as I can...then ask why I see them that way, then I'll go to sleep, because that shit is tiring.

Adventure Time.

Candice, Franny, and I recently went to Florida to visit my snow-birding parents. They tow a trailer down with a giant conversion van, which Dad and I affectionately refer to as "The Red Ram of Death," and stay in a park a mile from the beach in Melbourne. As all of us Michiganders know, they avoided one hell of a pummeling winter this year. The moment we walked out of the Sanford-Orlando airport the humidity healed our dry-cracked hands and coiled Franny's curls into a majestic pasty-white-girl afro. My folks graciously stayed with friends and gave us their trailer so we wouldn't have to get a hotel. In this humble abode we both got caught up in day-dreaming about living in smaller scale and having a more fluid arrangement that would allow us to move as the winds of inspiration whisper suggestions to us. Like we do when we play out the "what would you do if you won the lotto?" scenario we started thinking about how we could live without the sandbags of adulthood responsibility feeling so crushingly heavy and how we can live...with more adventure!

I've always reveled in little adventures: tornado warnings, power-outages, snow storms, heat waves, you know...things outside our control that people generally like to complain about. To this day I'm totally bummed I lived in St. Louis during the Great North-Eastern Black Out of 2003. My buddy tells me he never felt closer to his neighbors than in that little 3 day stretch when everyone was outside grilling food together and living in the sun. This probably explains why I moved around so much too.

In 2006 Candice's mom and her boyfriend sold their house, bought an RV, and drove out to the sunny West to live off the land a bit and sell their hand-made jewelry and other home-made goods at any market that would have them. After time in Arizona, they settled in several spots in California, and eventually ended up as Camp Hosts at Lime Kiln State Park within Big Sur on the Coast of central Cali where we were able to visit them. The park was closed to the public at the time because of forest fires nearby so they had the grounds mostly to themselves. We got to stay with them in their camper while they tended to things and shoo'd away people trying to enter the closed park. I'll never forget the views from the cliff overlooking the ocean-side or the romantic afternoon picnic Candy and I had on it. I'll never forget the sea-sickening, spaghetti-noodle-winding Highway-1 and its giant rock-stabilizing nets covering the mountainside, protecting us from being smashed. Or the cold nights when the space-heater wasn't enough to keep the windows in the camper from dripping their condensation on we stowaways in the loft. Or the GIANT cheddar cheese block we ate leftover from a conference on the grounds. They were living their dream, but it wasn't easy. More often than not, they were living day to day as well, the same way we are, just in smaller confines with fresher air and crashing waves nearby.

Last week as we mentally mapped out what we could change to find more adventure, a question dawned on me: Is adventure simply glorified adversity?

I live a pretty comfortable life now. The hunting aspect of my early 20s is long gone. Though I'm not sure I could put it into words succinctly, I've found who I am. I've found the person I want to live beside and grow old with. Together we've created the most adorable darling daughter the world has ever seen (wink, wink). We have a piece of clay we're molding into home. The two of us have secure avenues for work and a whole host of friends and family whom we love and love us. By most peoples' standards we're "living the dream." But there's a lingering feeling that we could be doing and experiencing more.

Surrounded by retirees down south I wondered what it must be like to spend 30+ years building a life filled with all the things mentioned above just to bid all of it adieu and coast into those golden years building a new sense of home. Why does our culture that tell us to keep our noses to the grind-stone so we can prepare for adventures in the future? Why not adventure here, why not now!?!? Cue various punk songs!

But instead of smashing the system or fighting the man I'm considering donating more to my 401K, like a big boy, for the future. In the meantime we'll keep dreaming about taking-this-show-on-the-road and making-a-go-of-it, and other nice phrases that imply adventure. I think we have the goods to do it, but do we have the courage? Time will tell.

Training Wheels.

This morning while on my way to fetch cat food and pay the water bill I caught most of Diane Rhem's interview with pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Dinnerstein is an accomplished pianist and writer who has taken to teaching children music using Bach as inspiration, she calls it "Bach-packing." One of the bits that stood out most for me was her explanation of how to create separate "voices" with the left and right hand on the piano, taking two different songs essentially and weaving them together to make a cohesive piece. The way she teaches children this idea is to ask half her classroom sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a loop and the other half sings Row, Row, Row your Boat. As a relative dumb-dumb on how music really works, it's was as surprising to me as it was to these kids hearing how well the combo works. One of the callers during the interview joked about how he couldn't convince his hands to play different tunes which is why he now plays the saxophone. It's a riveting interview and you can check it out here. She explains that everyone has a dominant hand and teaching even seasoned adults how to bolster their secondary hand can expose a vulnerability that can be devastating to morale'.

When I was in third grade or so my folks realized I had some balance issues. I guess it stemmed from my inability to figure out how to ride a bicycle without training-wheels. While most of my neighborhood peers had it down several years before, I couldn't get it. This, paired with poor grades and a distractibility in the classroom at school, worried them. As fate would have it, a business called Sensory Systems Integration was renting the basement classrooms of our church during the week. I don't remember much about the technical side of their practice, but they ran all sorts of exciting tests on me trying to figure out where my brain was having its complications. I remember getting messy playing in shaving cream, sifting through a giant box of dried beans for pennies I was allowed to keep, pulling myself through obstacle courses on a little wheeled-block, looking at Rorschach test images, and swinging in a chair hanging in the center of the room. Along with christmas ornaments and other prominent knickknacks from my childhood, a few years ago my folks bequeathed the "Occupational Therapy Evaluation of Sensory Integration" official test results from 1988. It summarized my issues in cold, calculating language, that sort of hurts to read now, ultimately assessing I had a mild learning disability. But all I remember from that time is the fun I had trying to make my body do and feel things.

After this assessment, an occupational therapy plan was approved and the therapies I mention above took place, to get my mind syncing more with my body. I remember enjoying the hell out of therapy! Play in shaving cream? Sounds great! Every time I see it I envy the dude who jumps into a pool of caramel in some candy bar commercial on TV, sounds like a hoot! I think therapy lasted for 6 months or so and was discontinued in the summer after the therapists saw the progress they wanted to see.

Since first grade I had been playing "Dad's Club Softball" as well. Given my sensory complications...I had a pretty hard time with various facets of the game. Namely, all of them. In the spring of third grade, amidst the therapies, it was suggested I try playing softball left handed. My mom and sister were lefties and though I seemed to favor my right side, writing was the only advantage it concretely had, so it didn't seem like too much from left-field to try it. (you like that? left field...left handed...eh? come on!)
And so, as I had with my sister's jeans in the past (what, we were about the same size and it was the 80s), I borrowed her left-handed glove mid-season just to see how it'd feel. I don't remember much about the first game as a lefty up until the final inning. The opposing team was at bat with 2 outs, they were down 3 runs, and the big kid known for big hits was at bat, one giant hit and the game was over.
Like they did with all the scrubs in DCSB, I was in the outfield, right-field specifically. As Casey came to bat (probably not his name, but might should've been) all of us scrubs crapped our pants. Low and behold he hits a humdinger right in my direction, the game is over because, what, I'm going to catch it? Right. And wouldn't you know it, my skinny, lacking-in-musculature-according-to-the-test-results, right arm with a newly acquired left-hander glove worn for the first time, MADE THE CATCH! I didn't hear it, but my dad recounts the story with him yelling from the bleachers: "THAT'S MY BOY!!!" And for the first time my teammates pat me on the back for something.

Hearing Simone Dinnerstein playing Bach's "inventions and sinfonias" with battling "voices" tit-for-tatting each other on the piano in perfect harmony blows my mind. Imagine the synapses that must be happening in the brain to get the body to do such things! I can only dream of playing an instrument that well. As well, I can only dream of having the ambition to try and play an instrument that well. But that's another topic for another day. I feel like a pretty self-aware person, but I still wonder if these sensory issues play out in ways I'm unaware. Their spectre haunted me for a moment my first semester in college when I flunked a Psych. 101 test. Graciously, my folks talked me into using a tutor and I got past it. These days I tend to see it as a lack of effort and improper understanding of consequences, but that may be some denial on my part. I got through the rest of school just fine after that and hit my best stride in my last year. Perhaps I just needed to feel failure. Luckily, through it all, I'm a pretty sweet bike-rider and whenever the topic of ambidexterity comes up, I'm able to say "well, i'm not properly ambidextrous, but I play baseball and anything with swinging left handed" followed by my best Goofy "Ah-Hilllt" laugh. Who knows where I'd be or what I'd be doing without that shaving-cream...

"Canvasing time and space..."

I can still see it so clearly, 2 words written permanently into my mind on the blackboard in the basement: Chronos and Kairos. My dad had given a lesson at "children's time" that previous Sunday about these words. Chronos is Greek for time and implied simply the time that passes around a clock. But Kairos, Kairos is the meat here. It loosely translates to the times of our lives and this is the word that made Dad grin and well-up just explaining it to us. All of the experiences that we deem major-life-moments are Kairos.

In lyric-writing I've repeatedly used, or alluded to, the phrase "time and space." It's even become a stupid little quip I utter when someone is reminiscing: "time and space, man...time and space." It's those moments when the mind's eye can picture perfectly who we were, who we were with, where we were, and what we were there for. Kairos exists in the sites, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels of the time and space we're in.

In 2003 I moved from Grand Rapids to St. Louis, Missouri, simply because I could. I scored a job and moved with one car-load into a studio apartment in The Loop. I was a Teacher-Assistant at a school for "adjudicated youths" (court ordered because of bad behavior) in a "secure" facility (magnets locked all the doors), and we had padded rooms to hold kids when they'd violently act out. Before the school year started I was trained on how to properly restrain and physically disable kids when they posed a threat to themselves or others. I don't want to say they could smell my fear, but certainly they could sense my naivete. My love of extreme music, vegan-straight-edge lifestyle, and general unfamiliarity with all things pop-culture baffled them, which should've given me some sort of advantage, but really just made me feel disconnected from their world. As the lone, young white guy on staff I was often a focal point of ranting and raving when these children lost control and tumbled down their behavioral rabbit-holes. One particular time, I remember being encircled by staff who were trying to talk this older kid down as he spit his rage at me. As he called me every name in the book and threatened me up and down, I had to sit in silence in order to prevent escalation. It was demoralizing, but I was patted on the back for doing the right thing in that moment. But I think that was a turning point where I realized I didn't want to be a Teacher-Assistant much longer. During the summer program we received notice that that boy died in a car crash fleeing police. And I have a pit in my stomach because I can't remember his name.

It was a grueling experience that I cut short to follow greener pastures after a year, but boy do I remember so much of that year: the ring from my first Nokia cell phone, the florescent gas station light across the street that never went off, the sounds and smells of rush-hour traffic clogging up the intersection at Skinker and Delmar, the sound of coffee beans grinding at Meshuggah's coffee shop, the excitement I felt browsing used CDs in Vintage Vinyl record store, the taste of apple-cinnamon pop-tarts - specially delivered to our room because they were vegan, the vision of 6-feet-200-pound Lavon sleeping on his desk immediately upon arrival every day, Tremaine covering up some mischief in his devious smile with beaming braces, sweet Josh's poor acne covered nose (he was my favorite), Ms. Kim standing in the doorway beckoning a student in her ever-so-Delores-Umbridge sort of way, tossing frisbees at shattering-against-the-wall speed after school with Coach in the gym, seeing The Passion of the Christ in the theater and quickly regretting that choice, discovering the Vietnamese market sold "mock-duck" and making my version of tuna-fish out of it, being sonically-floored by Modern Life is War at the Lemp Arts Space, napping after work and waking up at midnight to realize I just had to go back to sleep, running through the adult playground they call the City Museum, staring up at the great Arch in downtown, and I could go on...and on. These moments are so clear in my mind.

One of the major focuses of the program at the school was good decision making; trying to get the kids to think about what they were doing as they were doing it and convincing them to choose a better behavior. It sounds like TV crime shows, but we'd often say "you don't have to do this," unfortunately, most of the time it was too late. The behavioral pattern was already in play and they'd already determined there was no turning back. I was 23 and felt out of step with the world, and most days, at least at work, I felt the shiver of survival in some way or another. My stint in St. Louis was a minuscule blip on my life's radar, but it was such a vital time.

I often wonder within moments if they'll be something I remember in years to come? Will they be as visceral as 2003? Will they turn out to be Kairos? And then I immediately scold myself for not allowing myself to be in that moment. The phrase itself, "the times of our lives," just sounds whimsical and makes me want to drift into memory-dreamscapes where all the light and fluffy things jump out and hug me. But without adversity perhaps those things wouldn't be as memorable. As I canvas the time and space of the "times of my life," luckily, for the most part, feelings of gratitude outweigh my sense of hardship. From the time Dad explained it to me I always felt Kairos celebrated the positive things in life, that must've been his natural take of it, thankfully, it rings true for me too.